Faculty Scholarship: Open Access

What is Open Access?

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

Open Access works fall under two main publishing categories:

Open Access Repositories (known as "Green" OA):Free online access to materials provided by the author (self archived, or published in an institutional repository). Peer reviewed, scholarly works published in conventional journals may also be published in an institutional repository or on a personal website to increase access.

OpenAccess Journals (known as "Gold" OA):Journals that automatically and immediately make their articles available online to all at no cost. (There are a variety of business models,but the articles are always free to read.) Open access journals can be searchable within a digital publisher’s collection. For example, EBSCO allows the user to limit searching to open access journals.

Why Support Open Access?

Open Access benefits the larger community of scholars, researchers, and community members because knowledge is not stuck in expensive, subscription-only databases. OA publishing, however, is not just altruistic- it benefits authors. If an article is open access, it’s more likely to be read and more likely to be cited.

Open Access by Peter Suber

OA expert Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold.

Resources

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.

The mission of Open SUNY Textbooks is to provide an academic-friendly publishing model and infrastructure which supports faculty adoption, remixing, and creation of open educational resources (OER) and courses.